Why still mess with this ancient computer?

[analmux]

-> Double GTIA Upgrade

 

I'm starting a new gig in October with supposedly better money and the Double GTIA upgrade will be among the first things I can finally finance. As I have little skills (and no time) for manufacturing the boards, I'll have them done in the Valley (at least a prototype). For the moment, I cannot say how much the final boards will cost "down the line".

 

Hello Mux !

 

AB.

879204[/snapback]

 

Hi AB, yes it was nearly two years ago we last discussed the double GTIA+ANTIC upgrade. Are you still having problems with it. I've made the upgrade before I was on the AtariAge boards, and made it in 3 weeks time, and I must admit it was a pain in the *rse to debug the circuit. Do you have a test circuit or something?

But maybe (to make things a lot easier) you can cut off the DRAM (with decoder circuit I've put on it) and use SRAM instead (maybe 2 * 62256 (= 2*32kB)).

 

@ Gunstar: Yes I've made that 3 years ago, but it has a separate board for the 2nd Antic+Gtia because it has 2 antics working simultaneously, so the 2nd antic needs it's own memory (accessible by buscontrollers in memory locations $D6xx), and it's supposed to be a double PAL or NTSC not both. So what you're doing is totally different.

Edited June 23, 2005 by analmux

[andy_bernstein]

Hi AB, yes it was nearly two years ago we last discussed the double GTIA+ANTIC upgrade. Are you still having problems with it. I've made the upgrade before I was on the AtariAge boards, and made it in 3 weeks time, and I must admit it was a pain in the *rse to debug the circuit. Do you have a test circuit or something?

But maybe (to make things a lot easier) you can cut off the DRAM (with decoder circuit I've put on it) and use SRAM instead (maybe 2 * 62256 (= 2*32kB)).

 

Hello Mux,

 

Thank you for replying.

 

As you know, these last four years for me have been extremely difficult (re: "hell") and I had little time for anything beyond the necessary.

 

As I said in my last post, I'm starting a new employment in the fall and I should have the extra money to have a professional proto board manufactured in the valley at that time.

 

That's all I can say for now.

 

AB.

[mos6507]

I have a more balanced view of old computers today than I did maybe 10 years ago. I think that in the old days there was a fine line between programmer and end-user. Our computers booted up with a BASIC prompt unless you had a disk drive with a DOS. They invited you to tinker. When I got my Atari 1200XL the first thing I did with it is write a BASIC program to plot all sorts of lines and points to make artwork that I couldn't save because I didn't even have a tape drive. Basically it was like ice sculpture.

 

I think this was a healthy learning environment that we've largely lost. Programming today is mostly a memorization exercise. That's progress obviously because programmers are inherently lazy and don't want to reinvent the wheel. So code reuse is a good thing. However, today, computer literacy is about using applications on computers, not even writing programs for users. At best, something like HTML, Javascript, and FLASH have replaced BASIC as a language for the masses, but it's not the same.

 

But nostalgia aside, when you look at what an 8-bit machine is capable of, there are huge classes of application which are beyond its capabilities. I used my 130XE through college in the early 90s as a word processor and it was fine for that. But by the mid 90s I wanted to play around with 3D rendering software. I wound up getting an Amiga 1200 which was fun until THAT platform started to stagnate with C= going out of business and Motorola stopping development of the 68K line, and I eventually got assimilated into the Wintel monopoly.

 

8-bit machines are more fun to program but not to use as computers. Which means the only thing you really should program is games. I only had a couple years under Windows 98. When I switched to Windows 2000 I stopped getting so many crashes and Windows wasn't so horrible anymore.

 

In the old days I used a 4-track recorder with all of the limitations of that technology. Just recently I just got SONAR on my PC and a multitrack recording card. Now, for the most part, the only limit is my own musicianship and my worn out ears. In the old days I used to play around with moviemaker software on the 8-bit. Now I can do any animation I like with Flash if I wanted to spend the time on it. I just had a 2001: A Space Odyssey experience sharing my daughter's birthday celebration over the webcam with my mom and dad. I'm able to store/watch/listen to all sorts of media. Plus the rest of the internet like this website, online bililng, amazon.com, google news, or my employer that pays my bills.

 

On the flipside, my ATI AIW Radion 8500 has the crappiest software suite in the world. I can not use the tuner without crashing the PC. And I have to deal with locking my PC down with firewalls and spyware checkers and such (sign of the times). Despite that, I'm pretty happy with the state of the art with computers right now.

 

I actually used my 8-bit in the early days of the internet with a shell account. I used FlickerTerm80 as a VT100 terminal and browsed the web via LYNX. It was a kick that I could do it at all, and in the end at 14.4K speed which is FAST for text, but it was still like walking around only seeing in black and white.

 

I allowed myself to get a little too attached to the Atari and to a lesser extent the Amiga (as an heir apparent) and used to fantasize about how those platforms could be extended. And I went to usergroup meetings and followed the lingering 3rd party supportbase as promises got broken and numbers dwindled. I would have loved to see 65816s, new OSs, exotic PBI devices, etc... I was the epitome of the die-hard. In the end, as my needs grew, the old sentimental hardware not able to keep up with them.

 

Obviously games never really become obsolete so there is always that. But I can't see myself ever firing up AtariWriter again. It served me well, though.

 

I think the only "serious" application I'd want to run on my 8-bits again would be BBS software because I like the idea of having a little dusty piece of hardware hooked up to the internet via telnet that is intentionally limited.

[+Stephen]

or think on the new trick used in Theta Music Composer 2.0 for a 40x40 display using the vscrol register and the internal antic cache.... and and and...

 

all these things available back in 80s...and we had a same creative scene like the amiga scene was in terms of games etc...

 

Wow - do you have any more details on this video mode? I've been too busy for the last month to read the forums, but I am back working on my 8-bit again.

 

Stephen Anderson

[Heaven/TQA]

here it is for all who missed it...

 

doc:

http://www.s-direktnet.de/homepages/k_nadj/mode9++.html

40x40.zip

[+Stephen]

here it is for all who missed it...

 

doc:

http://www.s-direktnet.de/homepages/k_nadj/mode9++.html

880907[/snapback]

 

That's pretty impressive! Any reason for the color change every new textline, or was it just to show there is enough CPU time to do it?

 

Man - I really need to make that chroma/luma monitor cable. Too many things to do, too little time.

 

Stephen Anderson

[Heaven/TQA]

the colour changes are just there to indicate where new gr.0 line starts...

[Xebec's Demise]

the colour changes are just there to indicate where new gr.0 line starts...

881601[/snapback]

 

I loaded it up. That's pretty neat. Did you help design the mode too?

[Heaven/TQA]

no. it's Jaskier's & Fox' Atari Brain product incl. all Numen experiences....

[Starman]

Nostalgia. I could, but really don't have time to do anything worthwhile on the A800 except play games I had when I was in high school. I can't even think of anything original to do with these things. What HASN'T been done yet? If I were to do anything it would be some lame graphics demo or a new DOS system, but beyond that, I'd personally rather spend time developing stuff for OS X.

 

Mike